In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women's alliances in early modern Europe. This volume expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women's political alliances.

The life of Marie-Madeline Jodin offers new pespectives on the world of 18th century women, on the feuds and politics of European court theatres and entailing the discovery of an important, previously unknown, French feminist.

The author examines the presentation and reception of early modern women's voices as they followed an uncharted pasage into print. In each instance, the writer's decision to launch her story initiates a complex series of responses from different readers.

The conventional female role in early modern England was governed by male authority figures who could, if need be, decide a woman's fate. This study explores female food refusal during that period linking it to gender, human agency, communal social practices and institutional power.

This first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women's life writing in a specifically Irish context provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts. By making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women's narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape.